Teaching you how to meet your neighbors, grow food together, share the harvest and create a life that excites you.

The Food is Free Project is creating a repeatable model of growing food and community. It is our vision and wish to empower you with the knowledge and know-how to transform your block and neighborhood step-by-step. Using salvaged materials we are building front yard community gardens for all to share. Imagine walking down a block lined with fresh produce ready for the picking. Neighbors not only growing food together, but becoming friends and supporting one another.

The Food is Free Project is a community building and gardening movement that launched in January of 2012 and recently filed as a 501c-3 Non-Profit. We teach people how to connect with their neighbors and work together to line their street with front yard community gardens that can be harvested and enjoyed by everyone in the community. The gardens are built and offered for free using salvaged resources that would otherwise be headed to the landfill and volunteer labor. Generous donations from local businesses help us fill the beds with soil, compost, and seeds or plant starts. Using these materials, we build drought-tolerant, wicking bed gardens, that require little maintenance and only need to be watered every 2-4 weeks. This simple tool makes home gardening accessible to everyone, regardless of experience level or available time. A wide variety of vegetables along the block promote neighbors to interact and connect, strengthening our communities while empowering them to grow their own food and reconnect with the earth.

What To Do

Plant a front yard community garden and label it "Food is Free." Start to interact with your neighbors as you meet them in the garden and start a conversation about what you want your community to look like. By using food as a medium to connect us we can create communities that support one another, where we're safer, happier and sharing our passions.

3 min ·
The Food is Free Project is creating a repeatable model of growing food and community. It is our vision and wish to empower you with the knowledge and know-how to transform your block and neighborhood step-by-step. Using salvaged materials we are building front yard...

27 min ·
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28 min ·
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2 min ·
Thirty community volunteers come together to transform their neighbor's front yard into a lush, edible garden. Daily Acts Founder Trathen Heckman shares his thoughts on how small actions can help address big problems like climate change, water scarcity and suburban...

27 min ·
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52 min ·
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30 min ·
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3 min ·
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46 min ·
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5 min ·
They laughed and said it couldn't be done... but sure enough, a group of permaculturist's were able to turn an area of desert into a lush garden that could support food and plants, using permaculture principles established over the last several decades. This film explains how...

2 min ·
We can no longer stomach our food system. It's killing more and more Americans and costing billions in healthcare. 78% of Americans eat organic food, because they think it's healthier. But is organic really better for us or just a marketing scam?
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Most people – even many of those who support small farms and eat organic food – believe that there’s no way to feed the global population without the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, fossil fuels, biotechnology, heavy equipment, and the rest of the agribusiness...

Bonnie Azab Powell ·
One of the most frequent criticisms leveled against the sustainable agriculture movement is that its proponents want to send farmers back to 19th-century hard labor, with hand weeding and harvesting. Here's an incredibly cool group of eco-minded "farmer-scientists" who aren't...

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In many towns across America, Walmart, or a similar mega-retailer, is the only option you have when you need (almost) anything. Big-retail is a monopoly in its truest form and it has become so, not through "free market" economics, technological innovation, supply and...

Ross Chapin ·
Community is not just for extroverts. For thousands of years, our ancestors lived in barrios, hamlets, neighborhoods, and villages. Yet in the time since our parents and grandparents were young, privacy has become so valued that many neighborhoods are not much more than...

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With Summer Solstice right around the corner for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, this is the peak time to be outside, among friends, enjoying all that the season has to offer. And what better way to celebrate than by doing a whole lot of sharing?
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